The Long Peace of East Asia

Timo Kivimäki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317025177
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The annual number of battle deaths from interstate and intra-state conflicts in East Asia has declined by 95% since 1979. During the past three decades, East Asia has been more peaceful than Europe, the Americas or any continent, in terms of battle deaths per capita. When generating theories on peace and war, studies almost never look at the experiences of East Asia. Yet the region by focusing on a commitment to development, is a social reality that is less paranoid, less militaristic and more cooperative. Since 1979 there has been a commonly accepted rule to keep domestic issues domestic so that external military interference, that often caused the majority of battle deaths, was not needed. Thus the emergence of the long peace of East Asia is historically specific, and cannot be generalized by studying objective, material conditions independent of common perceptions and common interpretations. This does not mean that the East Asian experience is not relevant for other regions in the world, but that generalizations should not be attempted to be drawn from the material conditions, but rather from the lived experience and socially constructed realities of East Asia. Since East Asia is a spectacular case of pacification, and since it has not contributed much to our theories of peace and conflict, The Long Peace of East Asia is an important book for studies on peace and war.

Chapter 1 Aim and Concepts

DOI: 10.4324/9781315555959-1

Objectives

East Asia has become peaceful without scholars generally even realizing this.¹ When recipes for peace are sought, we often look at Western-European experiences of integration, lower borders and the turning of historical enemies into friends. However, the long peace period in Western Europe is not unique: similar periods have also been experienced elsewhere, but these have not had much influence in the development of theory of peace and conflicts. Instead, Europe has largely dominated the field. However, during the past three decades, East Asia has been more peaceful than Europe, Americas or any continent, in terms of the numbers of battle deaths per capita. Like Europe, East Asia used to be the most belligerent area in the world, just before its dramatic change. Since East Asia is a spectacular case of pacification, and since it has not much affected our theorization of peace and conflict, it is a very useful case to study. Perhaps peace in East Asia can be sustained? Perhaps it can be deepened? Perhaps the East Asian peace model can be emulated elsewhere?

1 The long peace of East Asia, lasting over three decades, was largely unrecognized before the launching of the pilot project on East Asian Peace by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, NIAS in 2009 and the follow-up program at Uppsala University since 2011. In addition to my own work, there are a few other works that recognize the drastic decline in conflict in East Asia (Svensson and Lindgren 2011; Svensson 2011; Tønnesson 2009; Goldsmith 2007). The regional differences in conflict patterns in general have been recognized in a few important studies (Goldsmith 2006; Kacowicz 1998; Thies 2010; Henderson 2009).

The present book starts from the pragmatic interest of peace research as a tool of reducing suffering caused by war. Its ultimate objective is to contribute to the reduction of the number of people killed by conflicts and political violence by offering understanding that can help remove causes of war, criticize the knowledge that constitutes the legitimate forms of violence, deconstruct social realities within which war is a rational strategy, and construct interpretations and social realities that help create peace. In the next chapter, I shall explain the general approach of neo-pragmatist study and the existing theoretical literature on the main pillars of the long peace of East Asia and their contribution to the current understanding of East Asian security. Before all of that, though, I shall define the two main concepts of the topic of this book, “peace” and “East Asia.” At the end of this chapter I will then present the structure of this book.

Security and Peace

The question of what can be included in the concept of peace and what not depends on at least three things. Firstly, it is a practical question of what one wants to focus on, what kind of clusters of issues one can analyze and which issues make an interesting totality. In this study, the normative starting point of peace research, the interest in defending life against violent death has guided the focus in my definition of peace. Peace is a state of matters where conflicts do not violently threaten human life. Fear of violence is a problem, but the focus here is not psychology of fear, but the rational reason for it: I am interested in whether people should fear for their lives, and thus I am not looking at how many conflicts there are, but whether human beings should be afraid, whether their lives really are threatened. East Asian peace means that they, in general, should no longer be afraid, as the number of lives taken by the violence of war has declined dramatically after 1979. This normative starting point in the preservation of lives against the violence of wars determines the definition of peace as a state of matters where lives are not lost in conflicts. The interest in the survival of concrete human beings places the focus on battle deaths, instead of regime survival, number of conflicts, stability or something else: peace can be noisy and it can, at least conceptually, coexist with instable political regimes and political systems, just as long as there is no violence that claims lives. In Chapter 3 I will explain how this definition of peace can be operationalized to a form that can be measured, so that broader generalizations could be made.

Secondly, the question is of the analytical relevance that the different issues under focus have for each other. There are analytical ways to study all of the various kinds of threats and how their “inclusion into the security realm” affects the way they are being dealt with (on securitization theory, see for example Waever 1995). However, if one wants to find ways to prevent threats to peace, the roots of environmental threats and threats to people emanating from authoritarian violence, it is not analytically possible to find coherent analytical approaches for the venture. The study of the source of environmental threats requires understanding of biology, environmental studies, and so on, while the study of intentional threats by enemies (conflict studies) requires a very different approach.

Thirdly, focus and framing of what belongs together and what does not, is a political matter as associations and dissociations are social realities. In traditional East Asian security studies and research in international relations, association between people's security and national security has been seen as weak while the association between regime survival and security has been very strong. Peace is stability of order, and lack of uncontrolled change (Leifer 1989; Mearsheimer 2001; Ikenberry and Mastanudo 2003; Christensen 1999; Goh 2008. This characteristic in old Malaysian security thinking is analyzed by Shamsul 2007). Opening up to broader concepts of peace and security—such as human and non-traditional securities—has lately promoted the political importance of human survival in security and peace studies in East Asia (Peou 2009; Strategic Peace and International Affairs Research Institute 2007; Caballero-Anthony, Emmers and Acharya 2006; Acharya 2004) even if nations are still considered as crucial instruments of the security of citizens even in the East Asian human security literature (Dan 2007; Enoki 2007). Concepts of non-traditional security and human security are tolerated in the debate as long as it is clear that the security of human beings cannot be in contradiction with the security of the state (Peou 2009; Caballero-Anthony, Emmers and Acharya 2006). This is why more radical concepts of human security that incorporate authoritarian violence in the phenomenon of security threats (Booth 2007; Krause 1998) are viewed with suspicion.

Since the objective of this book is to look at the long peace of East Asia as a phenomenon positive for people (peace as a concept needs normative relevance), it cannot consider Pol Pot's stable rule in Cambodia as peace regardless of how safe it was for the state. The starting point of this study is the security of people, while the security of states for the long peace of East Asia is seen in the instrumental value of the states to their citizens. The security of Pol Pot's Cambodia had a more distant association to peace than, for example, today's Japan, Indonesia or South Korea have. From this human-centered political point of view, I have to take a ruling different from that of the mainstream East Asia literature, in favor of including repressive authoritarian violence into the conceptual category of threats to peace. In an analysis that aims at grasping the big picture of developments it is difficult, though, to include violence against civilians (either by governments or by terrorist groups) consistently, because reliable numeric data on this type of violence is missing for periods before 1989. I have nevertheless assessed the impact of this problem in my conclusions in Chapter 3. Furthermore, I have made qualitative references to authoritarian violence as a threat to peace also later, in the analysis of the sources of such a peace.

Since my intention is to try to explain and understand how the long peace of East Asia has been developed and constituted, I cannot simultaneously consider non-human threats to security as threats to peace. When looking at the sources of conflicts, I shall be operating with intentional threats to people and states, and thus, the modeling will involve interaction. However, there is no intentionality or interaction between casualties and an earthquake, and thus the modeling of such a threat would need to be very different from that of genuine conflict threats. Thus I define threats to peace as man-made, intentional, and a threat to human life. I use the indicator of battle deaths as one of the most useful proxies for the analysis of the kind of peace that I want to study. While some others (Goldsmith 2007; Chich-Mao 2011) use militarized interstate disputes as their indicator of conflicts, I feel that a definition that values human lives and focuses on violence against people is better indicated by the number of people who have died as a direct consequence of conflict.

In East Asian peace studies conflicts are often seen as violent disputes between several states or between a state and intrastate groups. Analysis of intra- and interstate conflicts is often kept separate as the explanations of these could require very different theoretical apparatuses. Existing literature shows often in intuition that while interstate warfare has declined in East Asia, intrastate warfare has increased. This is claimed explicitly at least in Narine (2002: 195) and Vatikiotis (2006). This, of course is not the case if the amount of conflicts is measured by the number of casualties. As I shall show in Chapter 3, conflict violence has declined drastically after the 1970s.

Yet in some of the existing literature intra- and interstate violences are treated in a single explanation. Lee Jones (2010, 2012), however, sees Southeast Asian conflicts as reflections of social struggle between classes, and thus denies the strict differentiation of intra- and interstate conflicts. According to Jones, ruling elites of ASEAN frame peace and security in class-terms, while the national framing with strict norms of non-interference is just the technology of hegemonic ideological power for the elites: it is useful for the elites if people and external powers perceive East Asia as strict with the norm of sovereignty because it helps the elites in their management of elite–people relations.

The fact that battle deaths in East Asia have disappeared simultaneously in intra- and interstate relations suggests that it could be possible to find common sources to intra- and interstate peace. However, the much more drastic decline in interstate conflict suggests that there are also independent sources of interstate peace that do not affect, or affect less, intrastate conflicts. Due to the fact that my analysis concludes that many of the intra- and interstate conflicts have similar roots, and due to the fact that my argument of the sources of conflict suggests that intra- and interstate conflicts are parts of the same conflict dynamics, I shall try to cover both intra- and interstate peace in this book. Internal conflicts are often at the core of wars in East Asia, but mostly they escalate only once external powers get engaged in the originally domestic conflicts. Furthermore, development orientation that became the prominent approach to governance once East Asia became pacific, affects both intra- and interstate warfare. Once states tackle the economic grievances of potential rebel constituencies, they no longer need to divert the attention of dissatisfied populations by demonizing external enemies. In this way, the developmentalist approach to security has contributed simultaneously to peace within and between states. Thus it seems that the sources of the two types of conflicts are so intertwined that an analysis of one also reveals most of the sources of the other one. In this respect I have to conclude with Jones (2012), that the distinction between intra- and interstate dynamics is not as real as it is presented.

While my conceptual apparatus considers violent disputes between any groups as relevant threats to peace, my quantitative mapping of the reality of East Asia peace is limited by the fact that there is no reliable data that pre-dates the year 1989 on the extent of conflicts that do not involve states. I have made estimates of the impact of this problem on my conclusions in Chapter 3 and treated non-state conflicts as conflicts in my qualitative analysis.

The concept of peace in this book is undeniably negative. The absence of political violence and fatalities of such violence is the narrow meaning of peace in this book. That positive peace—cooperation for the removal of structural violence, or disarmament for the more productive use of resources and more trusting cooperation between potential conflicting parties—is left out of the main analysis of this book is due to the fact that East Asia has not yet expanded its peace to the more positive structural and cooperative problem-solving directions. As will be shown in Chapter 3, the small and declining number of fatalities of traditional conflicts between two or more armed groups is at the core of the long peace of East Asia. The negative nature of the long peace of East Asia will be revealed in the empirical exploration of the peace in Chapter 3, and the potential for moving from negative to positive peace will be speculated upon in Chapter 9.

East Asia as a Region for Focus

What is a relevant region for the study of peace and conflict is, again, a practical, an analytical and a political issue. A region is created by interpretations, and the association of some localities with some other localities, the ruling of someone out of and someone else in a region is about as political an issue as is possible in world politics. Defining regions is political gerrymandering. In East Asia, the basic setting has been that China, the mightiest regional power, has promoted regionalism that excludes non-Asian powers (mainly the US, but also Australia and New Zealand). This is understandable as these powers could tilt the otherwise favorable power balance in the region. The countries most concerned about the rise of Chinese power, such as Japan, would be eager to be more inclusive in the definition of the region. The central role of ASEAN in East Asian region...